A short tour of what each tool does and why. Everything runs in the browser: nothing to install, and nothing is lost on reload — the site remembers what you typed.
Harmonica tablature is hole numbers. A bare number means blow, a minus
in front means draw: 4 is a blow on hole four,
-4 is a draw on the same hole. Apostrophes mark bends,
an asterisk marks overbends, zero is a rest.
A chord — several holes in one breath — is written as a plain run:
345 to blow, -123 to draw, bends after
the numbers: -23'. An octave — two holes with a gap —
takes an underscore: -1_4. Brackets say the same and
are read just as well: (1 2 3), -(1 4) —
and they are needed where a number has two digits: on a chromatic
12 is hole twelve, while one and two together are
1_2.
A space separates notes — but where each one carries a breath mark,
the borders show without it: 1-2-3+4 reads as four
notes in a row. A plain run without marks is still a chord:
-23 is taken at once, -2-3 one after
the other.
People write tabs differently — +4, 4B,
(4). The site reads all of these, and shows and copies
tabs in the notation you pick in the help block under the editor,
where every sign it understands is listed.
Type tabs into the field: the site checks them as you go, shows the
melody as pills and lights every note on the harp layout. What it
cannot read gets a red wavy underline; notes that do not exist on the
chosen harp show as ! — you cannot play them until you change the
harp or transpose.
Above the field is the tab language — the key and tuning the tabs are written for. It is not the same as the harp below: the language says how to read the numbers, the harp is what you hold. Found tabs written for another harp? Set it as the language, pick yours in the «Harp» block and press «Convert to my tab language» — the text is rewritten and it still sounds the same.
A bare note is an eighth — the note blues is played in. Every extra
space adds another one: -4 is a quarter,
-4 a dotted quarter. A dot means one and a half, as
in written music — -4. — and a mark writes what is
shorter than an eighth: -4/16. Effects attach to the
note:
~ is vibrato, w is wah, slash and backslash
are slides into and out of a bend. A line after a hash is not played
— that is for lyrics or a heading. The icons in the corner of the
field copy the text or save it as PDF.
If your melody is written in notes rather than tabs, start here. Pick a key, click notes on the piano or on the staff, and they are added to the field as tabs for the chosen harp. Put the caret in the middle of the text and the next note lands there, not at the end.
The key here is about the key signature: it decides whether new notes are written with sharps or flats, and leaves what you already typed alone. The melody below shows how it all falls on the harp in your hands.
The bar at the bottom plays what is typed in the editor, note by note, lighting the current one both in the melody and on the harp layout.
Tempo is in beats per minute, from 20 to 400: learning goes better slowly, and speed is added later. Count-in is how many beats click before the start, so you can get the harp to your lips — it can be turned off.
Transposition shifts the whole melody — by a semitone, a tone
or an octave, up with a plus and down with a minus. What you typed
stays as it is: the shift lives on its own and shows in the melody
under the editor. This is how you find the harp on which a tune has
no notes it cannot play — the ones marked !.
Ready-made melodies in tab: pick one from the list, open it and listen. The harp is on top, the melody below it, then the player. Melodies are searched by title, and the no bends button leaves those you can play on your very first day.
Lyrics, when there are any, sit right in the tabs as lines starting with a hash: they show up in the melody and go onto the PDF, but are never played. If a melody has a video, the link is under the player.
Pick a key and a mode — the site builds the scale octave by octave and shows it as tabs for your harp. The position follows automatically: second position on a C harp is G, and the other way round. The range switch turns the whole scale into the pentatonic — the one the blues rests on.
The checkboxes on the left turn octaves on and off: playing the whole
scale at once rarely works on the first day, and one octave is a good
start. Below, the scale becomes an exercise — sequences like 1 2 3 — 2 3 4, up, down or both ways, with the metronome.
A rhythm is a breathing pattern: draws, blows and rests on the beat, played as a chord on the first three holes. This is where one starts — fingers have nothing to do with it, and holding the beat is learnt exactly like this.
The hit track is at the top of the page. An arrow up is a blow, down is a draw, a dot is a rest; the longer the hit, the wider the arrow, and a bar line shows where the bar ends. Above the track are the beats of the time signature: accented ones are outlined, and during playback the highlight runs along them — you see where every hit lands.
A lick is a short phrase — the stuff a blues solo is built from. They are sorted by technique: no bends, with bends, with overbends, which is also the order in which they are learned.
A lick page has the harp on top, the lick itself as a melody below it, then the player. Set a slow tempo, switch loop on and play until it sits in your fingers; then speed it up.
All licks are written for a C harp, Richter. Pick another key and
the hole numbers stay the same — as they should: a lick is a
fingering, not a set of notes. On an A harp the same
-4' -4 -5 gives the same blues, just in its own key —
which is why players say «in second position» without naming notes.
A different tuning, though, does change the numbers: a
chromatic has no bends, and the same note is taken with the button
— 4s.
The circle ties three things together: the key of the harp, the position and the key of the tune. Pick any one and the rest follows, and the lines under the circle say in words what came out — how many sharps or flats, which notes they are, and the relative key.
This is the clearest way to see why blues on a C harp is played in second position: that is G, a fifth above C, the next sector on the circle.
The metronome is meant to be watched, not only heard: the pendulum really swings, in time with the clicks. You can practise by eye with the sound off — handy when the harp is in your mouth and counting out loud is not an option.
Tempo from 30 to 300, up to twelve beats to the bar, subdivision. Every beat can get its own sound — strong, weak or silent — and the pitch of the clicks is set in hertz. The weight travels along a real tempo scale, as on the mechanical thing, and you can drag it: move the weight, change the tempo.
An online tuner, but not a general one: it is made for the harmonica. An ordinary tuner says "D, twelve cents sharp" — and you stand there working out which hole that was. Here the layout of your harp sits above the scale, and the hole that is sounding is outlined. The note is shown as a letter, the hole as a tab.
Instead of a needle there is a strobe: the bands drift right when you are sharp, left when you are flat, and stand still when you hit it. A needle on a harmonica would shake with every overtone and with the force of your breath, while a picture that has stopped is visible out of the corner of your eye — the eye catches motion, not position.
The reference pitch is picked separately: harmonicas are tuned to 440 and to 442 hertz, and without that setting the tuner would argue with the maker.
The sound is read right in the browser: no recording, nothing sent to a server. The microphone starts when you press the button and stops with the page.
The same thing works as a bend trainer. A bend is the one place on a
harmonica where the pitch is yours to hold, not the reed's: fall a
quarter tone short and the note is out, and by ear you will not catch
it until you have something to compare with. Play -3''
and watch the bands — standing still means you got it. Overbends and
the chromatic button are checked the same way.
Theme and language are behind the gear icon in the header — three of each, and the choice is remembered. Melody, harp and settings survive a reload: close the tab, come back, everything is where you left it.
All of it is worked out and drawn by the browser itself, so JavaScript has to be enabled. With it off the pages still open and the text is readable, but there is no sound, no harp layout and no tab checking — nothing to do the counting.